(June 25): Kioxia Holdings Corp intends to offer US depositary receipts in the spring of 2027 to take advantage of runaway investor demand for exposure to AI-related semiconductor shares.
Speaking at the company’s annual general meeting, chief financial pfficer Yoshihiko Kawamura said the flash memory maker plans to tap the US market after the conclusion of its current fiscal year at the end of March.
“Our target timing is the beginning of the next fiscal year, around April, May or June,” Kawamura said its annual shareholders’ meeting. “This is a highly meaningful project for us as it establishes a direct link to the US market, and we are fully committed to making it a success.”
The company is also actively studying a stock split to make its Tokyo-listed shares, now the best-performing on the MSCI World Index, more accessible to retail investors, he said.
Kioxia, a supplier of NAND storage that has grown into Japan’s most valuable company this year thanks to an AI-fuelled boom for memory products, joins SK Hynix Inc in seeking access to world’s largest financial arena. SK Hynix’s announcement of a US listing on Wednesday, together with blowout results from fellow memory maker Micron Technology Inc, fired a broad rally among semiconductor supply chain companies in Asia on Thursday. Kioxia’s shares rose as much as 15%, adding to a nearly 800% rise this year.
Tokyo-based Kioxia specialises in a NAND, or flash, storage, used to provide fast access to data storage that’s less imperative to AI workloads than high-bandwidth memory that SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung Electronics Co make. But storage is growing in importance as the sheer volume of AI workloads grow. Pressure on all memory suppliers’ production capacity has steered demand toward Kioxias, which is also benefitting from data centre builders alongside mechanical hard disk drives.
See also: DigitalBridge said to explore options for Malaysia's AIMS Data Centre
“We are currently seeing very strong demand from AI,” chief executive officer Hiroo Ota told shareholders. “Right now, this upward trend in the NAND market is driven not only by AI but is also evident in PCs and smartphones.”
Uploaded by Liza Shireen Koshy
